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Passacaglia in C Minor

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$12.50
$12.50
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PIANO ARRANGEMENT OF ORGAN PASSACAGLIA IN C MINOR - J. S. BACH
The 3 voices of the original manuscript for organ are woven into 2 voices for the piano.
ENJOY the fullness and depth of sound!

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FOREWORD To Bach Passacaglia
by Helena Sandler

I did not arrange this piece totally by choice. My son, PETER, to whom this book is DEDICATED, requested it most emphatically after being entranced with the orchestral arrangement which Mikhail Baryshnikov choreographed, and to which he danced in the movie "The White Nights."

"Mom, I've just got to play this on the piano!" So, O.K., here I go undertaking this mammoth task, hoping to complete it before both he and I have white hair.

As it is, the task isn't complete; I just haven't the patience to tackle the Fugue, so that will be sometime in the future.

My goal here has been to keep the musical force of this magnificent work intact, while combining the three contrapuntal lines into two. But most compelling, exciting, and shocking, has been the discovery of Bach's non-traditional phrasing in a traditional mode.

Bach was quite the innovator, a rebel with tremendous originality and the ability to express the new in a conventionally accepted way.

Theoretically, and traditionally, four sixteenth notes are grouped together in simple time, as a natural musical rhythm and phrasing. But Bach, in this work and others, begins the phrase on the SECOND sixteenth of every group of four, giving a semi-syncopated feeling (similar to the bulk of Scott Joplin's work). And so, sometimes the phrasing is one, plus three or four or six or eight or twelve.

So for me, a question. Do I group it the "right" way, and leave the performer to figure out the NATURAL phrasing, or do I do the unconventional, and arrange the groupings to fit the music, even though it is "wrong"?

Guess what I decided?

Right!

So, even though some musicians may find this arrangement goes against all their previous training, I ask them to try it anyway, and see how this grouping helps to clarify and bring out the NATURAL phrasing and the TRUTH of the MUSIC.

Now----------------------Let's  ENJOY!!!!!!!

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